There is an Angel of Death, and her name is Vanessa

Day 33:  

General status update 

Hair: its continued adherence to my head, after 2 doses of chemo and 30 odd days, is a matter of wonder and amazement all round. Amusingly, on Twitter I have just been followed by the company that makes the cold cap, and another organisation which promotes its use. I may yet get to star in their promotional literature.

Nausea demon: he didn’t come home last night, but waltzed in trying to look nonchalant this morning, as the Chemo Muse and I were eating our breakfast. No-one said anything about anything, and the Chemo Muse and I decided to have another round of toast. 

Chemo Muse: keeping me busy; in a previous existence she may well have been an overseer of galley slaves, using a sharp flick of her whip to encourage the poor groaning wretches chained to their oars. Not that I resent her, or anything.

Chemo Brian: keeps beckoning me towards the sofa – it is so, so tempting, yet I must resist. 

Fatigue/weakness: back with a vengeance. I went out for some fresh air, and was barely able to put one foot in front of the other. Felt so weak and vulnerable, especially when a big burly bloke came up and asked me for money. Scurried – sorry, tottered – back to the womb-like safety of Gurkha Towers fairly shortly afterwards. 

Eyes: The 70s disco light effects have now abated, but there’s someone else on my chemo thread having strange eye occurrences, so it may have been chemo-related. 

Sleep, lack of: n/a 

Anxiety level (1-10): I simply don’t have the energy to be anxious at the moment 

State of mind: Trying very hard not to think about the fact that there are going to be another 70 days and nights of this.

 

 

In the days before the abolition of capital punishment in the UK, when a prisoner in the dock saw the judge donning the black cap, he or she knew that the game was up: they were about to given the death sentence. Condemned prisoners thus knew their fate immediately, before the sentence was pronounced by the judge; the modern equivalent of the black cap and its symbolism is the presence of a Breast Care Nurse at a meeting to discuss the results of your biopsy.

A week after my bruising encounter with the biopsy needle and the abominably discourteous Mr G, R & I sit in the waiting room at the Charing Cross Hospital Breast Care Clinic at just after 9am; we have an appointment at 9.10 am to hear the biopsy results that will determine my future. It has been a difficult week, with far too much time spent googling breast cancer, and finding far too much information about its confusingly many different varieties.

My tip to anyone in the same situation would be NOT to do this, although I doubt it would have deterred me, had I been given such advice. Iin retrospect, however, it was just a very scary waste of time: the only particular sub-variety of breast cancer you need to know about is the one you are actually diagnosed with, if it comes to it. I would have been much better off spending the time watching my as yet unviewed boxed set of series 2 of The Killing.

There are only a few of us in the waiting room, as it is so early, and our faces are all painted various shades of pale and stressed. I look round at the other women, two of whom are wearing the tell–tale chemo headscarves, and think ‘No-one is here for a good reason’. After a few minutes Mr G enters the clinic and, as he walks past, smiles at me.

Much like a Roman augur scanning the entrails of a bird for portents of divine intent, I am desperate for any sign that the future might be going to pan out the way I want it to; I thus interpret this smile as a favourable omen.

 ‘He wouldn’t have done that if I’d got cancer, would he?’ I say to myself, by way of reassurance.  ‘He wouldn’t have smiled at someone if he was about to tell them they had cancer’.

We don’t have to wait long. Mr G comes to the office door and calls us in, and as we sit down he says ‘We’ll start in just a moment – as soon as the Breast Care Nurse comes to join us.’

And this is the moment I know for certain that I have breast cancer, because it doesn’t seem feasible, even to one as open to denial as I then was, that a Breast Care Nurse is going to be joining our meeting in order to advise me on how to look after my breasts better, so that they don’t grow any more of these silly lumps in future.

There is an Angel of Death and, as it turns out, her name is Vanessa.

When Vanessa the Breast Care Nurse has joined us, and been introduced, Mr G has to don his metaphorical black cap and pronounce the sentence.

He leans forward very slightly and looks at me.

‘As you know,’ he begins ‘we were very worried about you last week…’

I’m sorry, WHAT? I don’t know any such thing. You didn’t SAY you were very worried about me, you said I had a lump with a pronounced ridge. No one at any point mentioned being very worried about me. Since when does ‘lump with a pronounced ridge’ mean WE ARE VERY WORRIED ABOUT YOU?’ Am I expected to make inferences from your oblique pronouncements? Would there have been anything wrong with saying ‘We are very worried about you BECAUSE you have a lump with a pronounced ridge, and that is a Very Bad Sign which  means you almost certainly have breast cancer’?

Wouldn’t it have been more sporting to have given me a bit more of a f***ing CLUE? How was I expected to know that ‘lump with a pronounced ridge’ = ‘breast cancer’? I’m not the lump expert, Mr G – you are. 

‘..and I’m afraid to say that the biopsy results have confirmed that you have Invasive Ductal Breast Cancer.’

Then R is holding my hand tightly as the world goes all blurred; my old life has vanished in an instant, and a new and very frightening one has come to replace it.

 

 

 

Addendum, 12th January 2012: it has been pointed out to me  - by my old tutor at Oxford, who takes his job so seriously that he is still critiquing my work some years after his professional responsibilities towards me  ceased – thank you, Philip! - that it is rather alarmist to compare a diagnosis of cancer to a death sentence and, of course, it is true that a diagnosis of cancer is not necessarily a death sentence.

 

I have already written on the blog elsewhere about my own prognosis:  given the nature of my tumour, and the various treatments I have had, am now having and will have later - surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and the hormonal drug Tamoxifen - I have a roughly 91% of disease-free survival for the next five years. I have NOT received a death sentence. Probably.

But in the blog post I made the analogy between the donning of the black cap and the appearance of the Breast Care Nurse to recreate my state of mind at the time; that was what went through my mind at that moment. When I heard that the Breast Care Nurse  was coming, I knew immediately that at the very least I was about to be told that I had a life-threatening illness,  and at worst - if it turned out to be a very aggressive cancer, or one that had already spread to my bones, brain or liver - it might mean, effectively, a death sentence.

Vanessa has been a huge support to me, and is incredibly good at what must be one of the

world’s most emotionally harrowing jobs, something I will be writing about later – but at the moment she first came into my life, her very appearance in the room symbolised the fact that I was about to hear some very bad news indeed.